I can’t really type right now (injured hand) but I wanted to put this out as it really ticks me off. We don’t feature stories here at the blog, but this one is particularly enraging. It’s about one woman’s experience with the massive amounts of pornography being downloaded in her workplace. (She is an IT manager and it’s her job to monitor Internet activity there.)
This is a form of “indirect sexual harassment” or sexual harassment that is not directed at a particular individual. Other examples are environments that display pornography or sexual graffiti, sex toys, or where lots of sexual jokes are tolerated.
Environments that allow this kind of material or activity are called “sexualized environments,” and they have been proven to have significantly higher ratios of direct sexual harassment than those that do not. What this means is that they actually promote direct sexual harassment of individuals.
I’ve only found information about cases in the United Kingdom, but here is a list of them if you want to read more about this issue. (Sexualized environments)
It’s really no different than allowing racist materials or jokes to proliferate–people who do this tend to get fired or asked to resign.
Why aren’t people getting the clue that gender discrimination follows the same patterns as racism?
Here is the story:
Part of my job as an IT Manager was to monitor Internet usage and conduct investigations when people violated the company policy. The policy – which everyone had to sign – prohibited visiting websites that were sexual in nature.
Over the past 4 years, I have seen more porn than I ever cared to see. We’re not talking Playboy kinds of stuff–this was hard core and disgusting. The VP of HR and an attorney in the Legal department started calling me the “Chief Porn Investigator.” Since I always seemed to find this crap on Friday, they made jokes about us having “Porn Friday.”
My boss was the VP of the IT department and he refused to let me spend the money to buy an Internet filtering solution so I could block these sites. He controlled the budget so there was nothing I could do. It took 18 months to convince the HR and Legal departments to force my boss to spend the money to block porn. They finally agreed when I investigated a fetish freak that visited some of the most vile websites I have ever seen. (One site was called “girlsthatgush.com”)
For the rest of the story…click here
BTW, I don’t personally object to pornography–I even have some. Much of it does not degrade, and it can be very artistic. But even this stuff I would never bring to work!
